Demolition Day

by Max Sleaze, images by Jurie Senekal / 17.08.2010

They are really doing it, they are taking down Cape Town’s Twin Towers. The sentinels that guard our cosy urban salad bowl from the upcountry carnivores, the tangible barriers that separate the city from the flats that extend beyond. Symbols, reminders, threats; intimidating all newcomers with the full might of what we have achieved, a link to our past and reassurance in our future. The continuity in what we believe in as a city, a creed, a culture, god dammit! All to be brought down in a moment of pure exultant agony in one live and globally televised spectacle.

Oh the inhumanity, the horror the horror, it’s an assault on all that we trust, it’s an attack on our very soul. Only the most evil of the axes could possibly even contemplate such a brazen attack on the soul of the city.
So sure are they in the inevitability, so confident are they in their means, that they are even giving us the exact time that it will occur, so it will come to pass that on midday on the 22nd of August, the world as we know it will never be the same again. A shady fringe outfit which hide behind the enigmatic abbreviation CTCC, apparently with no ties to the more established and decidedly more vocal ANCYL who have made so many threats that they tend to forget which threats they have already made, causing that annoying threat jam. No, not the CTCC, which generally operate only around election time and make no idle threats only empty promises, have told the world, in no uncertain terms that on the 22nd of August they will be changing the City landscape irreversibly, forcing weary travellers never to really know when they have reached the “safe zone” and making white people forever struggle to find a good Gatsby or the quick way to the Galaxy. Yes they are going to take the Athlone cooling towers down.

And we are all expected to be there to witness their might and well just despair, and realise that resistance is futile. They want the whole world to be just like them and where absolutely no structural dissent can be tolerated in the greater architecture of their universe!

Controlled implosion, precision engineering and minimal impact, Ha! Just mere euphemisms, we all know what collateral damage really means! Who knows what they have in mind to terrify us with the capabilities they have at their disposal. I for one will not be booking any flights that day.
Could this be the beginning of the end? Will the freeway to nowhere, so beloved by unimaginative advertising coke-heads, daring graf artists and vuvuzelas with small man complexes also go the way of the wrecking ball? Will the daring retro tripod tampons that cling to the mountain be scrubbed off their mountain perches? Will the Civic Centre with its block, drab, modernist, “fuck you, do we look like the kind of place that keeps office hours?”, finally topple like the steroidal domino it always was?
Will it not stop till every piece of land has a Waterfront, a faux clock tower and a fake Mediterranean square, with restaurants and poncy French names, all boomed off with plenty undercover parking and 24 hour security?

The local Eschatology chapter (that’s end timers to you and me) obviously think so, if facebook “that authoritative measure of our new society” is to be believed, up to 10000 people are expected to gather at Rhodes Memorial to witness the spectacle and prepare to meet their fate. It does seems to be important for humanity that in times of anxiety that we can stress out en masse, and anyway if you are going to either ascend to the heavens, or burn in a raging fireball you might as well have easy access to some good tea and scones, when the pre-apocalyptic looting and pillage starts!

I hear that the actual buildings are a danger and are crumbling to pieces and it is being done as a matter of saftely more than anything else…
sure they are a landmark but really how valuable ar ethey they are pretty much an eyesore…